Resurrecting a good diety

[jimmyjimjam]

The premise: a group of high-level adventurers set out on an epic quest in the Forgotten Realms to resurrect a long-dead God of good. Some questions:

1. Obviously, which dead good deity in the realms would be a good candidate?

2. Why would adventurers do this besides obvious reasons like just for the hell of it, because they worship said deity, etc?

3. What could be done about potential portfolio overlap with current deities if anything?

4. What might the process look like besides getting some new worshippers for the deity together?

 

[Shiroiken]

The premise: a group of high-level adventurers set out on an epic quest in the Forgotten Realms to resurrect a long-dead God of good. Some questions:

1. Obviously, which dead good deity in the realms would be a good candidate?

2. Why would adventurers do this besides obvious reasons like just for the hell of it, because they worship said deity, etc?

3. What could be done about potential portfolio overlap with current deities if anything?

4. What might the process look like besides getting some new worshippers for the deity together?

1) Hard to say, as IIRC, the Sundering will bring back most of the fallen deities. Also, my Realms Lore isn't that strong (I mostly read the older work).

2) They could worship the deity, the deity could be the patron of their home, another deity could charge them with it, they might need divine help against an upcoming invasion, or they might even start by accident.

3) I have the same questions about the Sundering. My suggestion would be to find minor variations of Portfolio and divide the Portfolio accordingly.

4) Read Godborn for an example. The divine essence of each god cannot be destroyed, only moved. This might involve destroying the being that has the essence, or finding a holy wanderer who carries it.

 

[Irennan]

1: As it has been said, with the Sundering most deities will be back on their own. If you don't want to wait fot an official complete list (the one in the PHB isn't) or want to ignore this aspect of the Sundering, I'd suggest Eilistraee as a good candidate. She's a beacon of hope for all drow, she stands for freedom, fighting tyranny and never giving up no matter what hardships she has to face, and strives so that all races can live and work in harmony to build a future of life for everyone.

2: Heh, this depends on your group. Maybe the adventurers strongly believe or identify themselves in the ideals that the deity you want to bring back stands for, have a backstory related to it, were somehow involved into the task by followers/priets of said god, or through certain events and so on...

3: Make the returned deity an exarch or an ally, split the portfolio -as already suggested-, or simply remove the rule about two deities not being allowed to share the same portfolio. With Eilistraee there isn't such problem, her portfolio hasn't been taken by anyone.

4: There are rules for it:

1. You must find a Priest of the Dead God in question.

2. The Dead God Priest must be powerful enough to Cast True Ressurection (or whatever the equivalent is in 5e), you can use a Scroll or Artifact if you don't have that power.

3. You must have a powerful artifact of the Dead Deity, containing some fragment of his essence

4. You need as many worshippers as you can get of the Dead God

5. You must go to the Astral Plane and Find the Dead God inside it

6. You must perform the ceremony with the worshippers intensely focusing their will on getting their deity back.

 

[Andor]

He might be the only being to know some critical piece of info. Or be linked to something the PCs "that library was lost when the island sank after it's Patron god died." Or be the only one capable of defeating some mythically linked foe who is now threatening the PCs/the world/breakfast.

There are mythical accounts of the resurrection or retrieval of Gods from death/doom. Isis resurrecting Osirus. Jupiter saving his siblings from his father Chronos (who had eaten them.) Persephone and Hades. You could do worse than taking inspiration from real world myths.

For a twist, perhaps the BBEG is the god himself, evil and scarred from the loss of some noble part of himself. So in resurrecting the good god they are actually redeeming or making whole the evil one.

 

[Scrivener of Doom]

[MENTION=68717]jimmyjimjam[/MENTION], as has been pointed out, if you're going to run the 5E version of the Realms, most of them are going to be coming back anyway but let's just leave that to the side for the moment and assume you are running the 4E era of the Realms so you are post-Spellplague and pre-Sundering. (Coincidentally, that's where I now run the Realms.)

1. Obviously, which dead good deity in the realms would be a good candidate?

Tyr or Helm. While Helm is, strictly speaking, lawful neutral, there is a lot of lawful good about him.

2. Why would adventurers do this besides obvious reasons like just for the hell of it, because they worship said deity, etc?

What if Cyric has partially freed himself - a la Tharizdun in PoLand/post-RttToEE Greyhawk - and the only one who can put him back in his prison is either Tyr or Helm for some story-based reason.

3. What could be done about potential portfolio overlap with current deities if anything?

In both cases, Torm holds their former portfolios and he would consider that he is only holding them in trust for them anyway.

4. What might the process look like besides getting some new worshippers for the deity together?

If you're familiar with 3.5E's excellent Elder Evils, I would treat the partial escape of Cyric as something like the appearance of an elder evil in that book. There are signs in the sky and all manner of difficulties and along comes some oracle of the dead deity claiming that only the dead deity has the power to banish this new evil.

You could then have the PCs acting on behalf of the dead deity and their successes in the dead deity's service then expands the base of the deity's worshippers.

(NB: I am assuming that the PCs want to be part of this, of course.)

How's that?

 

[jimmyjimjam]

Some cool ideas guys, thanks.